Christina Hajjar, ©UWinnipeg
Self-taught artist Christina Hajjar graduates this June with her degrees in business and women’s and gender studies at UWinnipeg. She has headed to Toronto for a two-week residency with the Feminist Art Conference this month to work on her scholarly art project titled Iterations of Home, a multidisciplinary, multi-media project reflecting on her Lebanese-Canadian identity.
Iterations of Home explores her family history and positionality as a first-generation Canadian living on stolen Indigenous land. This project involves the creation of a translated photo album, a memoir cookbook, performance art, photography, and poetic reflection.
“I started this work in August 2016 after returning from Chile when I was working closely with CONSTELACIONES on Return Atacama,” shares Hajjar. “Seeing Monica Martinez make art about diaspora, family, place, and exile in response to the 1973 coup, and collaborating with her, encouraged me to pay attention to my own questions on home, belonging, and migration. In particular, it gave me the tools to consider performance art as a mode of inquiry.”
Inspired by Martinez, Hajjar’s themes in her scholarly research include the politics of home, nation, diaspora, food culture, social location, settler complicity, white-passing privilege, embodied memory, intergenerational/ inherited trauma, and mimicry.
Hajjar is a queer femme cis woman and first generation Lebanese-Canadian living in Winnipeg, on Treaty 1 Territory. She uses art as a point of connection within her communities by participating in artist collectives, facilitating group projects, organizing workshops, creating zines, and amplifying the voices of individuals at the intersections of multiple oppressions.
Throughout her studies Hajjar has been working closely with Dr. Roewan Crowe, (Chair, Women’s and Gender Studies) who has been a mentor to her, “My own knowledge and arts practice grew by co-coordinating community events at the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies, learning about feminist art in Dr. Crowe’s classes.” added Hajjar.
Hajjar was Crowe’s research assistant, doing creative assignments, and eventually becoming a collaborative member of the art collective, CONSTELACIONES which inspired her project. Crowe’s feminist pedagogical approach disrupts normative hierarchical relationships in academia, and Hajjar felt she could really bring herself to various projects thanks to Crowe’s inspiration.
To learn more about the conference visit the Feminist Art Conference.
